Thus said David Levine on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 20:43:50 -0500: > > The comment in mhfixmsg which I quoted at the beginning of > > this thread seems to be saying that sometimes message components > > described as text/* are really binary files, and that the > > 998-character limit is used in mhfixmsg (only) as a heuristic to > > identify this situation. > > I wouldn't call it a heuristic. It's definitive, according to RFC > 2045.
One of the reasons why RFC 2045 has this definition can be found in RFC 5321 (previously 2821, previously 821) where a Text Line is defined: 4.5.3.1.6. Text Line The maximum total length of a text line including the <CRLF> is 1000 octets (not counting the leading dot duplicated for transparency). This number may be increased by the use of SMTP Service Extensions. So, regardless of the on-disk format or how a message might meet RFC 5322, if it wants to be sent via SMTP, it will have to be encoded in some fashion (enter MIME, uuencode, etc...). Andy -- TAI64 timestamp: 400000005a66d3a7 -- Nmh-workers https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers